Sam Gideon

I once had ridiculously high hopes for Vanquish, the new game by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. The trailer certainly piqued my interest. It looked like a Japanese riff of Halo complete with their own armor-suited hero and invading army. The fact that it was made by Mikami gave me confidence that the game would have solid gameplay mechanics. After all, this is the man who birthed the survival-horror genre and reinvented it years later with Resident Evil 4. He knows shooters.

But what I saw at E3 didn’t wow as much as I expected. Don’t get me wrong, Vanquish is still shaping up to be a great-looking game, but I was expecting something that I’ve never seen before. I wanted my mind blown. To his credit, producer Atsushi Inaba showed a beautiful third-person shooter set on a space colony. Players take on the role of Sam Gideon, who was part of a team building a new battle suit. He’s thrown into an enormous conflict between the United States and Russia after his team is attacked. To survive, he dons the suit and works with other military forces to fend off the Russian invasion.